May 2004

One day in March last year, Ismat Siddiqui left her grown daughter and grandchildren at her Karachi, Pakistan, home for a routine errand. When she came back a short time later, they had vanished.

They haven't been seen or heard from since.

Now, her youngest daughter, Aafia Siddiqui, 32, a former Houston resident and a neurological sciences expert, is the subject of a worldwide dragnet, wanted by the FBI as a terrorist recruited by al-Qaida to help attack the United States this summer.

Ismat Siddiqui refuses to believe it, insisting her daughter is a sweet, single mother who adores her children.

"The family does not have any knowledge that she helped anybody associated with al-Qaida," said Annette Lamoreaux, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney who represented Aafia Siddiqui's brother, Muhammad Siddiqui, when FBI questioned him last year in Houston about his sister's disappearance and possible connection to al-Qaida.

Lamoreaux said Muhammad Siddiqui, an architect living in Sugar Land, won't speak with the media, but he told her he is scared. He doesn't know what happened to his sister. He fears she could have been kidnapped by political extremists, Pakistani intelligence agents or even by her ex-husband, Mohammed Khan, who he said used to beat her.

"He and his family are very concerned about the well-being of his sister and her children," Lamoreaux said. "No one has heard from them for 15 months and they are very, very concerned."

Muhammad Siddiqui could not be reached Wednesday for comment.

https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Ex-Houston-resident-sought-as-al-Qaida-fixer-1519956.php

When Siddiqui's brother, Mohammed, a pediatrician, moved to Texas in 1990, she followed him to complete her studies, attending the University of Houston. She then went to MIT, where she majored in biology, before beginning her Ph.D. at Brandeis in cognitive neuroscience. Her fellow students and teachers remember her as studious, soft-spoken and pious. It was during university that she became interested in radical Islam.

https://www.newsweek.com/2014/09/26/aafia-siddiqui-woman-isis-wanted-trade-foley-then-sotloff-270830.html

SARS has more than one meaning.

The newly obtained SARS documents filed by Fleet shed additional light on the federal government's effort to track Siddiqui and Khan's activities–and raise questions about possible links to other Saudis in the United States. As early as October 2001, long before Khalid Shaik Mohammed's capture, FBI and Treasury Department investigators were alerted to the couple's possible terror links in a series of SARS filed by Fleet. At the time, Fleet's Financial Intelligence Unit was trying to trace $70,000 in wire transfers on the same day, July 10, 2001, to two Saudis in the United States. One, for $50,000 from the Saudi Armed Forces Account at the Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C., went to a Saudi student at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. Two others, totaling $20,000 from the same Saudi military account, went to a Saudi national named Abdullah Al Reshood in Boston.

https://www.newsweek.com/terror-watch-tangled-ties-125287

“In Pakistan, the response to her verdict and sentencing brought the predictable mass protests, burning of American flags and effigies of Obama and calls for Pakistan to repatriate Dr. Siddiqui. They know who the real criminals are and who should be in prison for life! At present, Hilary’s state department harps on about ‘soft power’ and diplomacy, but what better way to quell US distrust in the Muslim world than to try such cases with due diligence and integrity.

In the US, not many people know about this case. Obviously many people were Hope-notized by the millions of dollars poured into the Obama PR machine – and believed when he said that his administration would be more transparent and lawful than the outlaws of the Bush era.”

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2010/10/17/injustice-in-the-age-of-obama